


Aftermath

by muaaimoi



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: F/F, Homura has issues, Mental Instability, One-Sided Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-11
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-08-08 03:22:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7741477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muaaimoi/pseuds/muaaimoi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world without Madoka, Homura can't cope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aftermath

Homura Akemi goes quietly insane.

She doesn't notice.

No one does, the one person who might have ever noticed, who knew her well enough, who loved her enough to pay attention, is no longer a person at all. Madoka Kaname transcended existence to become a magical girl who saved all other magical girl from a fate worse than death, becoming a concept and erasing herself from existence.

She is no longer present for Homura. No longer the fixed point of her existence that made life bearable.

And so Homura Akemi's rather fragile hold on sanity shatters.

She doesn't mean to lose it as she does. It is not what Madoka would have wanted.

In the wake of a world without Madoka Kaname, Homura tries. 

She fights the wraiths and protects humanity. Protects the other magical girls as best she can, ungrateful and undeserving as they are. Madoka loved them, and this world, so Homura does her best to protect it.

Every day, Homura ties Madoka's ribbons in her hair and silently renews her promise to do her best. For Madoka, always for Madoka, because Homura Akemi has no purpose beyond existing for Madoka Kaname.

If Madoka is now a Goddess, Homura muses often, in the beginning, as the only one who still remembers her, as her only acolyte, Homura is now high priests.

For a time, it's enough.

It helps to watch Tatsuya draw her in the sand though. 

Homura loses track of how many times she has to redo that first meeting with the Kaname's after Madoka’s ascension. They don't appreciate Homura's instinctive reaction to lift Tetsuya by his shirt collar and demands about how he'd seen his sister at all. Homura doesn't blame them, in retrospect. 

Tatsuya's tears hadn't been very informative anyway.

She even offers Madoka's mother her ribbons in the vain hope that it would jog her memory. Even in the time lines Homura had insisted she keep them, there had been no recollection.

So Homura turned back the clock and kept them, if she couldn't remember the single most remarkable human being she'd been lucky enough to raise, then Junko Kaname didn't deserve them.

Homura lasts almost a year in this vein. Keeping careful casual contact with the people Madoka loved. She even keeps an eye on Kyubey, in the timelines she didn't come to hate him completely, Madoka had been very fond of him. Madoka was fond of cute things.

Out of all the people Homura religiously protects, she likes Tatsuya the most. He's the only one who accepts that Madoka exists.

Homura has had to turn back time every time she's tried to explain her existence to the other girls, or else they would have believed her to be insane. Something she couldn't afford if she wanted them to trust her enough to protect them in battle.

She never once considers telling the incubators. They wanted witches, wanted the energy the transition between hope and despair released. If they knew about Madoka, they would wish to interfere. To stop Madoka from fulfilling her wish.

But then-then Tatsuya stops drawing Madoka, stops chanting her name like the prayer that it is, and something in Homura breaks.

It's not even the pain in her heart. The agony of missing Madoka every second of every day. Homura has learned to relish in that ache. The proof that Madoka exists, the knowledge that she could not miss someone so fiercely if they did not exists. That she could not love someone so passionately it hurt, if that person had never branded her name into Homura's very soul.

It's being the only one.

Madoka Kaname does not deserve that. 

Does not deserve for Homura Akemi to be the single bleak existence to love her. She deserves better, more. So Homura will fight, she will find a way to bring her back. So that the entire world would love her, worship her as she deserves. 

After all, how could they not? She turns back time to when Tatsuya first remembered and tries to think.

It seems reasonable to tell the incubator after that. She was the only link, the first and only inkling to the reason for the law of cycles. It would only be a matter of time before the incubators would make their move. To find a way to test her story.

Homura doesn't buy the entirety of her reasoning, really, but she doesn't care to push through to find the true reasons behind her actions.

Homura Akemi would do anything for Madoka Kaname. She had learned that truth early on, the first time she'd shot Madoka, to keep her from becoming a witch. There is no limit, no line she won't cross, no regret for all that she had done in her name or for her sake.

It seemed absurd that in a world Madoka herself had remade that it would be possible for Homura to find an exception. 

Homura Akemi would do anything for Madoka Kaname. Anything. Anything-except, it seems, live in a world without her.

In the world where there were witches instead of wraiths, Homura Akemi became a magical girl to save Madoka Kaname, the love of her life.

In another world, the world without Madoka Kaname, and in her stead, the Law of Cycles, Homura Akemi was still a magical girl. When Kyubey found her in a hospital bed and asked what wish would light up her soul, Homura had said six words.

"I wish to fall in love."

She wonders, sometimes, in her bleaker moments, which world truly came first.

In her more hopeful moods, she wonders if her other, Madoka-less, self would still make that wish if she knew the true extent of what it meant for her to love.

She likes to think she would.

**Author's Note:**

> I basically watched the movies and couldn't help myself.


End file.
